poetry & creative writing
Sometimes the most moving climate messages aren’t found in data or speeches, but in poetry, stories, and creative writing that speak straight to the heart. This collection features pieces that capture the beauty of our planet and the urgency to protect it. Whether you're reading or writing, let these voices stir your imagination and spark action.
“The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry
Berry offers a quiet meditation on the natural world as a sanctuary, contrasting human anxiety, especially regarding the future, with the calm resilience of wild landscapes untouched by fear, reminding us of what we stand to lose.
“Rise” by Kathy JetnÌ„il‑Kijiner & Aka Niviâna
This cross-cultural collaboration speaks from the frontlines of climate change—rising seas, melting ice, vanishing homelands—giving voice to Indigenous women whose communities face extinction yet still choose to rise, resist, and reclaim.
“Sonnet XVII” by Craig Santos Perez
Perez’s sonnet weaves love and climate grief, examining how environmental collapse, especially in the Pacific Islands, intersects with cultural loss, colonialism, and ecological memory.
“Some Effects of Global Warming in Lackawanna County” by Jay Parini
This poem grounds global warming in the everyday, reflecting how climate change seeps into rural life: unseasonable weather, altered landscapes, and the disquieting sense that nature is slowly, strangely unraveling.
Contemporary anthology: Earth Prayers, edited by Carol Ann Duffy
As spiritual and literary mosaics of voices confronting deforestation, extinction, pollution, and climate injustice, these poems serve both as mourning songs and sacred vows to protect the Earth.
Amanda Gorman’s “Earthrise”
Gorman’s spoken word piece is a rallying cry for climate justice, interweaving facts with fierce hope as she urges collective global action in the face of fossil fuels, warming oceans, and political apathy.
“green and blue” by Rupi Kaur
In spare, emotive lines, Kaur explores environmental degradation, such as rising seas, poisoned water, and ecological imbalance, as metaphors for loss, urging recognition of the Earth’s suffering as intimately connected to our own.
Jorie Graham’s climate work
Across multiple collections, Graham confronts climate collapse head-on by examining wildfires, extinction, melting ice, and technological apathy, through crafting poems that resist forgetting and force us to look directly at a planet in crisis.